Since its origins in mid-19th century Europe, the concept of “development”, has accused “backward” societies in the non-Western world. In its view, the latter were not industrialized; their technology was not sophisticated; their work habits were lazy; they were other worldly minded; and so on. The so-called civilizing mission of the British had indeed purported to set these things right in their colonies.

The power of “development” was so strong that many Indian intellectuals agreed with the colonial reading of their society. India’s path of industrialization did appear riddled with obstacles. But, early economic thinkers like MG Ranade, RC Dutt and Sir M Visvesvaraya felt that these negative realities need not stay that way: Indians might lack industriousness and work discipline but were capable of cultivating them; they might be fatalistic but could change their outlook.

In other words, even when these economic nationalists asserted that India could transform its cultural realities and become a modern industrial economy, they were not skeptical of the British understanding of Indian society. If they had looked into Indian folklore, they would have seen easily how greatly work was valued in India. The idea of development did not engulf the imagination of most Indians in colonial India. Mahatma Gandhi, in particular, saw the problem clearly. The central passion of his Hind-Swaraj (1909) was to show that the end of colonial rule alone could not mean freedom. Shedding the obsession with modern civilization, where people “make bodily welfare the object of life,” was crucial to do alongside. “True civilization,” he argued, showed humans “the path of duty.”

After Independence, the project of “developing” India has guided the imagination of economic planning in the country. There have been shifts of course in how development has been discussed — for instance, the idea of mixed economy is nearly extinct in public discussions today — but the term “development” has stayed on stubbornly.

In any case, the idea of development has not gone unchallenged in Independent India. Activists have asked, among other things, that the state commit to spending on education and health.

Broadly stated, the proponents and critics of development focus on how the external, material world needs to be rearranged and on the institutional means of going about it. In their discussions, both the advocates and the critics of development view individuals as secular selves with equal rights. Their discussions empty out the dazzling variety of individual selves and moral universes in the country. Images of fast cars, smooth roads and electronic gadgets in the West, and elsewhere, like Japan and China, have shaped the ideas of the good life among many Indians and often stirred discontentment about their absence in India. In recent years, this repertoire of fantasies is being aligned with the project of claiming India as a Hindu nation.

Crafting dissent against the evolving vision of development needs to engage the moral worlds of Indians. If the conquest of the self is among the key passions of local moral traditions, how can the politics of overcoming the fetish of development not engage them?

Local traditions that elaborate virtues of compassion, kindness, non-violence, charitableness, friendship, simplicity and generosity, whose idiom often cuts across religious boundaries, can go a long way in keeping things sane.

To take one instance: the Christian idea of charity (“the right hand ought not to know what the left hand gives”) and the Hindu idea of “dana” (charity), which affirm the ideal of selfless giving and reject ostentatious philanthropy, still resonate with moral sensibilities in the present. Similarly, the Bhakti tradition’s ethical insistence that social differences are accepted unconditionally enlivens the conscience.

When development threatens to merely promise a more comfortable life in the present, where one is not obliged to spare a thought for the others around, moral traditions go a long way in not letting it reshape the social conscience. They free us from development.

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